


If This Is Our Fate

by carate (hera_kun)



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, Character Death, Demons, Grim Reapers, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, based off a kuroshitsuji musical, it’s not it’s just sad, the tags sound more violent than it actually is djfhd
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-20 23:17:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17631614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hera_kun/pseuds/carate
Summary: Ironic, isn’t it, Junhui thinks bitterly, all I wanted when I was human was to escape living, and now after I’ve died all I want is to live. How cruel.Or, Junhui is dying, and Jihoon doesn’t know what he’d do without him.





	If This Is Our Fate

**Author's Note:**

> i fell asleep sorry this was late djfjdj
> 
> anyway so this is based off the second kuroshitsuji musical, which i actually have not seen in Years, but rest assured you don’t need any background knowledge of kuroshitsuji
> 
> here’s a brief glossary of some terms:
> 
> death scythe - a grim reaper’s weapon, not strictly an actual scythe
> 
> cinematic record - a soul’s record of memories
> 
> glasses - all reapers are incredibly nearsighted and so this is part of their uniform

_Another day, another soul to collect._ It was a very sunny day for winter, and Junhui had been enjoying it immensely. While the cold doesn’t bother him at all, (becoming immortal tends to make you impervious to extreme weather, after all) sunshine is the one thing that always brightens his mood. It’s something that hasn’t changed from when he was still human.

 _What are you, a sunflower?_ is something Jihoon often says when he catches him ‘photosynthesizing’, as Junhui calls it. _Mm, I think I’m more of a cat_ , would be Junhui’s reply, jokingly meowing afterwards. _Sound about right,_ Jihoon laughingly agrees.

Right now however, he’s observing his last soul for the day, an abhorrent young man who was about to be killed in self-defense by the girlfriend he’d been drunkenly beating for the last half year or so. Junhui couldn’t stand people like this, neither when he was alive nor as a reaper, and he always dreaded getting assigned to these souls. Usually, Jihoon would offer to take over for him, but this month they were loaded with a larger quota than normal, so they hadn’t had much time to thoroughly look through their lists. It’s fine, though. Junhui’ll manage.

It’s hard to watch though, the moments before the man died. Sometimes the things that people do are just as bad as demons, sometimes even worse than any demon could think of. It’s why Junhui’s stationed himself a ways away from the scene, several rooftops away from the man’s apartment. Reapers are not allowed to interfere with human life no matter what, the only interaction they’re permitted is soul collection.

And so he waits.

Soon enough, the woman runs out the front door, finally able to flee from her abuser. Junhui prays for her to have a safe recovery.

Junhui steps in through the window, taking out his death scythe to start the reaping. He makes a clean cut in the man’s already-wounded chest, and lets the scythe absorb his cinematic record. Everything was going on as normal, all according to routine. Until it wasn’t.

The record suddenly stops flowing into his scythe, and immediately starts attacking Junhui. He jumps back, caught off guard, but stands his ground and gets ready to fight.

A black mist has taken over the malevolent cinematic record, and starts tangling itself around Junhui’s legs. Junhui struggles, trying to cut it off with his scythe, but it keeps regrouping and wrapping itself around more and more of his body, slowly consuming him until he can’t move anymore.

 _This can't be happening_ , Junhui is struggling to breathe now, barely able to move his chest against the black mass steadily solidifying around him. _I’ve got to… get… out..._

And then he wakes up.

  
  
  


It’s been nearly a year since the Incident happened. For a while, he was okay. He’d managed to get the soul back into his scythe and submitted it along with the rest of the others he collected. He met back up with Jihoon and the rest of their team and continued on with his normal routine week after week after week. He handled it.

But it was bound to come back eventually.

Just when he thought he’d be able to forget about it and move on, he’d started getting plagued with nightmares of the memory every other night, coupled with steadily increasing attacks of excruciating pain for the past few weeks.

He can’t deny the truth any longer. He’s sick.

Junhui is a reaper, and reapers don’t get sick. And yet, he is. Has been for a while now, and he knows he's never going to get better. It shouldn’t be possible, really. As a grim reaper, he’s sentenced to an eternity of watching people die, Death’s punishment for those who take their own lives. And with eternity comes immortality, making it impossible for reapers to die unless it was at the hands of a death scythe. Or the Thorns.

He was weak. That’s the only reason he could have contracted the Thorns. The whole reason he and all reapers even went through training was to prevent this kind of thing from happening.

He hasn’t told anyone, at least not yet. He will, eventually. Hopefully.

It’s not that he hasn’t tried telling the team, because he has. It’s always on the tip of his tongue during weekly briefings, nagging at the back of his mind as Wonwoo and Jeonghan droned on and on about the month’s statistics and assignments. It’s all he can think about when he’s hanging out with everyone during breaks and after work, tuning out Chan and Seungkwan’s ‘friendly debates’ when he would otherwise be laughing along, maybe even egging them on.

But he never can find the timing to tell them, or so Junhui tells himself. _I’ll tell them_ , he says to himself, watching his friends snickering at one of Soonyoung’s dumb jokes as they had lunch. _Eventually_.

  
  
  


“Hey Jihoon!” Soonyoung yells from his desk all the way across the room. “Join us for a few rounds?”  
  
He shakes his head. “You know I don’t drink.”  
  
“Come on, Jihoon, we’ve barely seen you out of work this past month!”

“If I didn’t know you any better I’d say you were hiding a secret girlfriend or something,” Soonyoung snickers, attempting to throw his arms around the grumpy reaper. Like always, he fails, and has his arm twisted in a way that looks very, very painful. “Ow ow _ow_ , okayokayI’msorrypleaseletgoofmyarmplease,” 

Fortunately for Soonyoung, Jihoon lets go of his arm. Unfortunately for Soonyoung, Jihoon’s grip twists his arm around some more and forces him onto the floor before releasing him.

Jihoon straightens up and dusts off his hands nonchalantly as if he hadn't just body slammed the other reaper to the ground. “I can’t come, I’m busy.”

“Soonyoung’s right though,” Junhui speaks up from where he’s fixing his things. “I hardly even see you during work now, you always insist on us collecting separately. Join us?” Jihoon’s not looking at him, but Junhui’s sure that the other can tell he’s pouting.

“But you don’t like drinking, Junhui,” Jihoon moves to leave, heading towards the exit.

“Well, I’m not the biggest fan of alcohol, but when have I ever missed a chance to have fun?” Junhui sends him a sheepish smile, hoping Jihoon would take the bait.

Jihoon sighs resignedly, but doesn’t leave. Junhui never actually forces him into anything he doesn’t want to do, but Jihoon’s just always taken it upon himself to keep following him to things like this.

(“To keep an eye on you,” he once said when Junhui asked him why he kept coming along despite his distaste for parties and bars.

“Aww, you _like_ me!” Jihoon shakes his head, but doesn’t deny his words like he usually does. Junhui doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but maybe this time he’ll let his racing heart hope for once.)

“If bringing Jun with us was all we needed to do to make Jihoon come out of his man cave, we should’ve been doing this weeks ago!” Seungkwan complains as they settle down at a table for 7.

“I’m surprised it took you so long,” Mingyu rolled his eyes at the younger. “Anyone with eyes could tell he has Jihoon hyung on a leash.”

“Don’t act like you know better than me! You never even tried to invite him once!” 

“That’s because unlike you, I don’t want to bother Junnie or Jihoon hyung.”

“More like Jihoon’s beaten the fear of God into you,” Wonwoo quips, leading to an earful of Mingyu’s whining.

They’re all laughing along with the banter, but Junhui can see that Jihoon’s smile hasn’t reached his eyes at all tonight. While Junhui’s glad to finally be able to spend some time with Jihoon again, he could clearly sense that something’s bothering his partner.

Towards the end of the night, Jihoon leaves to go to the bathroom with the younger reapers, and so Junhui takes this as an opportunity to speak with Soonyoung and Wonwoo alone.

“Hey, have you guys noticed something’s up with Jihoon lately?”

“You mean more than the usual stick—” He glares at Soonyoung. “I mean, more than usual?”

“He _has_ been pretty secretive lately,” Wonwoo mutters. “Always off on his own both during and after work, and all that.”

“Yeah, you think it could be management pressuring him or something?” Junhui chews on his lip worriedly. Some of the higher-ups have decidedly kept a grudge against the younger reaper after he both refused a promotion and humiliated them at the same time. It was a hilarious incident for everyone but those involved, and so far Jihoon hasn’t been concerned at all about it, but who knows if something else is going on with him.

“Maybe,” Wonwoo gets up to pay the tab. “But Junhui, if anyone were to know what’s bothering him, it would be you. You’re the only one he ever tells anything to.”

  
  
  


“Jeonghan’s assigning us to the missing souls case.” Everyone’s gathered in the conference room for the weekly meeting. Wonwoo plops down into the chair at the head of the table and starts passing around papers from the tall stack of folders he was carrying. Jeonghan comes into the room after him, standing at the other end as he starts to brief them on the assignment.

“As you might have heard, a large number of souls have recently gone missing. Administration has actually been concerned for a while already, what with the increase in missing souls over the past year. But in the last couple of months, that number has drastically increased in volume. Fortunately, it’s also become more geographically concentrated within a few areas in Seoul. Management thinks we might be able to track down what, or perhaps, _who_ is causing all of this.”

Wonwoo stands and reads out the list of missing souls and a list of important locations. “Any questions?”

Soonyoung raises his hand, looking just about ready to burst out of his seat.

“What is it,” Wonwoo sighs.

“Can we call this Operation: Seoul Souls?”

“No, Soonyoung,” Wonwoo says disapprovingly, but doesn’t try to hide his amused smirk.

While everyone filed out of the conference room to start preparing for the mission, Junhui stays in his seat, unable to get his mind off of what happened that morning.

( _He wakes up with a painful jolt, his chest and limbs screaming in agony as he tries to get out of bed. He can’t_ move.)

“Jun,” Jihoon calls. “Let’s go, we should get a head start on this if we don’t want to do overtime.”

“Maybe we should split up for now,” Junhui suggests, “I just think we could cover more ground that way, you know?”

Jihoon raises his eyebrow. “Weren’t you the one complaining that we don’t see each other during work?”

“Well, yeah, but…” Junhui trails off, trying to come up with a believable excuse. His mind is stuck elsewhere, back to earlier that morning.  

( _He can't move he can’t breathe can’t move can’t breathe can’t move he can’t_ breathe.)

“Never mind.”

“Look, you were right,” He gives Junhui an apologetic smile. “I _have_ been pretty distant lately, sorry for not realizing sooner.” _I missed you too_ , is what he means. Junhui knows Jihoon’s not terribly fond of vocalizing his feelings, so becoming fluent in Jihoon-speak has been a necessity as his friend and partner.

  
  
  


They spend the better part of the week observing and monitoring the missing souls’ family, friends, neighbors, even colleagues, in hopes of finding some common link. However, they find no patterns at all, except for the fact that they had all lived in Seoul. And while a lot of the disappearances have been concentrated in several areas, they’re just too random for them to catch any kind of trail. The only thing they’re sure of is that whatever’s the cause, it’s not any mortal’s doing. Every single murder and serial killing is always recorded by the Administration division, so whatever’s taken all those souls must be out of their jurisdiction. 

“Could be the work of a rogue reaper,” Seungkwan posits. He’s strolling along the rooftops as they scanned the neighborhood for anything suspicious. Currently, their team’s split up into two units for the day’s investigation; Soonyoung led Mingyu and Chan back to one of the first locations, saying he’d found something of interest (hopefully he means in relation to the case) while Wonwoo, Seungkwan, Jihoon, and Junhui spread out a bit over the residential areas.

While Junhui’s still wary of working so closely with the others and risking them finding out, he’s just glad he hasn’t had another attack like the one earlier that week.

“Could it be, though?” Wonwoo mused. “If it were, then they must have access to an authorized scythe, rogue scythes are ridiculously easy to track.”

“Maybe it’s demons,” Junhui suggests absentmindedly.

Seungkwan groans, “Speak of the devil.”

“And he shall appear.” A trio of demons materialize in front of them, blocking their path. Junhui and the others immediately hold up their weapons, stances ready to defend against an attack.

“What have we here? A cute little gaggle of grim reapers, hm? Why don’t we have a bit of fun, boys?” The female demon seemed to be something of a leader, starting a fight with the group almost immediately. She’s flanked by a tall, slim male, who’s already swiping at Jihoon, who thankfully is quick enough to raise his scythe to block him.

The third one is large and silent, standing back and eyeing the reapers with disdain before he moved to grab Wonwoo, whose back is turned to him as he helps Jihoon, by the neck.

“Get lost!”

Junhui catches the demon’s attention and starts slashing at him with his death scythe. This one’s rather strong, managing to block most of his attacks quickly and easily. He isn’t even breaking a sweat whereas Junhui was already panting, out of breath. _Where was Soonyoung and his flamethrower when you needed him?_

But as he takes another step forward, Junhui suddenly collapses to his knees. _Oh God, it’s getting worse_. A burst of searing pain throttled his chest, rendering him immobile on the cold, icy ground. It _burns_ , almost as if someone’s stabbed him with a flaming hot knife a thousand times over, twisting it into every little crevice inside his body.

“Junhui!”

He can barely look up as dark spots begin to cloud his vision, but Jihoon’s panicked form rushing towards him is the last thing he sees before everything goes black.

**Author's Note:**

> here’s my small contribution to the ficfest hhh i’ll get the rest of the chapters up in the next few days hopefully (my paltry excuse for not finishing is i severely underestimated how busy i was going to be the past few months djdsjdhf)
> 
> oh and you can find me on twitter @junkwanteen!


End file.
